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What's New in Drupal 8.7

07May2019

Tamer Zoubi

CEO & Co-founder

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Drupal 8

Planet Drupal

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Drupal 8.7 was released couple of days ago on May 1, 2019. As you might know, new features are added with each minor release of Drupal 8 (e.g. between 8.6 and 8.7) which occur in 6-month intervals. Originally 8.7 was supposed to be released in March 2019. But the timing of Drupal's releases has historically occurred 1-2 months before Symfony's releases, which forces Drupal community to wait six months to adopt the latest Symfony release. In order to be able to adopt the latest Symfony releases faster, Drupal community shifted Drupal's minor releases to May and December in a plan to allow adoption of latest Symfony releases within a month.

This is penultimate version of Drupal 8, which will be concluded with Drupal 8.8 in December 2019, after which we expect release of Drupal 9 sometime in June next year!

Beside bug fixes and dependency updates lets see what new features Drupal 8.7 brings!

Revisions

Taxonomy terms and custom menu links are now revisionable, which allows them to take part in editorial workflows which was until now only possible for Content types and Custom blocks.

JSON:API in Core

Drupal 8.7 will provide an out-of-the-box JSON:API implementation, marking another major milestone towards making Drupal API-first.

Now you will be able to generate an API server that implements the JSON:API specification with zero configuration. Once you enable the module, you are done.

Developers and content-creators can use it to build both coupled and decoupled applications and pull content from Drupal into iOS and Android applications, chatbots, decoupled frontends such as ReactJS, voice assistants and many more!

Layout Builder module is now stable

Layout Builder module was originally added as an experimental core module in Drupal 8.5 and is now stable and ready for production use!

If you haven’t heard about it Layout Builder is offering a single, powerful visual design tool for site builders to create templated layouts and custom landing pages.

PHP 7.3 Is Now Supported

PHP 7.3 was released in December 2018 and comes with numerous improvements and new features. Also with this release new Drupal sites can only be installed on PHP 7.0.8 or later. Installing Drupal on older versions results in a requirement error.

However, existing sites will still work on at least PHP 5.5.9 for now, but will display a warning

PHP stopped supporting version 5.5 on July 21, 2016 and Drupal security updates will begin requiring PHP 7 as early as Drupal 8.8.0 (December 2019), so all users are advised to update to at least PHP 7.0.8 now or preferrably to PHP 7.3.

GDPR

As part of continuing GDPR compliance improvements in Drupal core, Comment module no longer logs IP addresses for comments by default. Existing sites will still continue to log IP addresses but this can be changed by changing comment.settings.log_ip_addresses to FALSE in the site configuration using settings.php.